Snow

Snow is falling here in Madison, but further south it turns to rain and then east it turns clear, so I should be able to make it all the way to Nebraska today. I just hope Cinnamon is not too much of a back seat driver.

Boy, you know you are in a Wisconsin hotel when the continental breakfast includes three types of cheese. Actually, this comfort suites has an awesome complimentary breakfast with eggs, sausage, waffles and all types of toast--including cinnamon raisin.

We lost interent access and cable at the hotel last night--wow was I bored. Hopefully, I'll have more access in Nebraska (har har) and I'll post more tonight.

Jim Williams on the Duck Stamp

Jim Williams of the Star Tribune, was at our Duck Stamp meeting last month. Here's an article he wrote on the program.

How can you help preserve habitat?
Hunters have long helped protect habitat. Birders need to lend a hand, too.

Three wrens found in Minnesota, all small, brown and feisty -- ready to scold should you encroach on their territory -- have a lot in common.

But they may not share the same future.

House wrens use a wide variety of semi-open habitats, none of which are in short supply. This is a common species of wren that can be found in orchards, brushy areas and back yards.

The other two wrens -- marsh and sedge wrens -- are dependent on very specific habitat, which is becoming increasingly scarce.

As their names suggest, sedge wrens need wet meadows, places where sedge often grows. Marsh wrens rely on cattail marshes. Unfortunately, many marshes and wet meadows are being drained, plowed and planted. And, if you take away a species' habitat, its numbers will undoubtedly shrink.

But marsh wrens and sedge wrens are being helped by an unlikely group of people: hunters. In fact, wrens should count duck hunters and pheasant hunters among their best friends, even though the relationship is not intentional.

You probably have heard of the duck stamp and of the hunting organizations Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever. Their aim is to protect and restore habitat for ducks and pheasants, but they also help wrens and blackbirds and herons and warblers.

Here's how: All waterfowl hunters are required to buy a duck stamp (officially called the Federal Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp). Money from the sale of this stamp -- an amazing 98 percent of the stamp's price -- goes to support the work of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The service operates 540 national wildlife refuges nationwide (12 in Minnesota) and purchases or leases what are called waterfowl production areas (WPA). Minnesota has 263,505 acres of WPA land.

Waterfowl production areas usually contain wet, marshy land surrounded by low, grassy meadows, all of which are duck-friendly. Where might one go to look for marsh or sedge wrens, red-winged blackbirds or common yellowthroats, one of our prettiest warblers? You would head for wet, marshy land surrounded by low grassy meadows.

Such land can be found around Pelican Lake in Wright County, on the edge of the metro area. Here draining, plowing and building have taken their toll on wetlands and grasslands.

Several months ago, 300 acres adjacent to the lake came on the market. Developers wanted it. The county got it, then resold the land to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for use as a waterfowl production area.

Important players in this acquisition were Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, the National Turkey Hunters Association, the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association and several local sportsmen's groups. These hunters pledged money to cover the county's investment, should that be necessary.

Today, the Pelican Lake waterfowl production area includes an additional 300 acres that ducks -- and dozens of non-game bird species -- can use.

For years, hunters have carried the weight of land acquisition and restoration effort. As the saying goes, hunters show up (at meetings), speak up (in support of birds and their habitat) and pay up (they buy the duck stamp, for one thing).

Birdwatchers seem to lack whatever it is that galvanizes hunters. I'm certain that birders care, but we seem unable to express ourselves in such an organized fashion.

Birdwatchers don't have to buy either a license or a stamp, but we, too, should work to preserve and create habitat. So how should we do it?

Well, you don't have to be a hunter to buy a duck stamp. You just need $15 -- about the price you'd pay for 50 pounds of black oil sunflower seed. The 2006-2007 stamp goes on sale June 30 at your local post office. So go out and buy the stamp.

If birdwatchers wait for someone else to start Wrens Unlimited or Phoebes Forever, we'll be too late.

Jim Williams is a lifelong birder and co-author of "Questions and Answers About Backyard Birds" (Adventure Publications, $9.95). He can be reached by e-mail at two-jays@att.net

I love my self packing bunny!

Who needs a wake up call from the front desk at a hotel when you have a bunny who decides to do laps at 5:45am? Go, my little health conscious lagomorph, go.

Yesterday, I was more than a little irritated last night, for some reason the photo application on blogger is not working. I tried to find some help on blogger.com, but apparently lots of people are having this problem and aren't getting help for it. I'm five hours away from Non Birding Bill, my webmaster who knows some tricks up his sleeve to get photos onto the blog but here I am away for a week, going to places with great photo opportunities, how can I not load photos? Well, since Cinna-bunny-butthead was kind enough to wake me up so early, I decided to try and see if I could figure out what kind of voodoo NBB works to load photos, and I'm sure I'm not doing it correctly, but I opened Cyber Duck and seemed to have figured something out. I'm sure NBB is going to read this entry and think, "Oh crap, what's she fiddling with and what is happening to other parts of her site?" or he may be thinking, "Finally, she's figuring it out and I won't have to put up with her wicked task master ways anymore, she can do her own website, mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaaa!"

Any hoo, I should be able to load photos now for the rest of the week. And to prove it, here is another photo of Cinnamon when I announced my triumph of finally uploading photos:

"I don't approve of you fiddling with the website. You might mess up my page."

Behold, the power of millet

Where does the phrase "Minnesota Nice" come from? I think it comes from snow days and it's an automatic reflex to help each other out of your parking spaces when you are plowed in.

When you're trying to get your car out and the wheels are spinning, people who you have never met or will ever see again will come up and give you a push. When you're walking around the neighborhood and see the same scene you are compelled, as if having an out of body experience to go over and give a push. Where we live, we have what's called a "Snow Emergency". When there is a lot of snow, the Snow Emergency is called and you are only allowed to park in certain areas while they plow the snow out of the way. If you don't move your car, the city will move it for you, as well as giving you a citation and charging you for the tow and storing it in the impound lot. It's not fun. NBB and I decided to try and get a good parking spot early and move the car out of the way before the Snow Emergency was declared.

We were particularly plowed in and required some shoveling to get the car out. Even after a nice guy from our building shoveled us out and tried pushing with Non Birding Bill, our little Saturn still would not budge. I remembered that I had some excess bird seed in the back, so we opened the millet, put it under the tires for a little traction and viola (along with more pushing), out came the Saturn. Woo Hoo. Who knew, millet is great for traction as well as sparrows and juncoes.

Speaking of juncoes, you know these guys are desperate when they are feeding off of a second floor window. Juncoes are almost always feed on the ground, but desperate times call for desperate measures I suppose. I even had a junco hanging off of my Clingers Only feeder, I've never seen a junco cling before. Another case of birds not reading books and being aware of how they are supposed to behave.

The cardinals were not putting up with the starlings. When I was downloading the NovaBird Camera photos, I would get shot after shot of starlings in various states of feeding, then all of them would be gone with one male cardinal sitting on the ledge. Is this the Chuck Norris of birds?

Meanwhile, the starlings tried to thug their way to whatever food they could. The downy and hairy woodpeckers were still able to get in a few nibbles of the suet on the log. I got the weirdest shot of a downy flying away after three starlings descended onto the suet log. It's looks huge and like some weird plane.

After all the snow, we ended with a beautiful sunset. There's kind of a nice clean look to the ally behind our apartment building. Alright, tomorrow, Raptor Center and then off to Eagle Optics.

Sharon's Chronicle of Snow

A snow day has been declared for where Non Birding Bill works, so I will now have him underfoot. I think today will just be me trying to pack and taking photos of birds at the feeder. Now all the birds are showing up. Yesterday you guys were singing your fool heads off thinking about territory, today you're at the feeder.

I've putting some food out for the squirrels as well. This poor guy just looks so bitter, like he woke up on the wrong side of the tree while running late and discovered he had no cream for his coffee.

NBB just informed me of a first, a crow has come up to the window suet feeder. NBB loves crows and this dude must be desperate, they never come up to our windows like this.

Birds As Weather Forecaster

So, I was a little snarky about this proposed snow storm. Yesterday morning, the view from my window looked like this:

I predicted by the lack of feeder activity, we wouldn't get much snow. So, what does it look like this morning?

Birds, you failed me as a weather forecaster! I shake my fist at you! My alarm clock this morning was a cardinal at the feeder chowing down. Often times, pigeons fighting over the window ledge are what wake me up, but they were no where to be seen. I opened the window to top off the feeders.

The snow is coming down and visibility is low. Metro area highways are being closed down, people are calling in to fm107 to report what they're seeing while not moving on the roads. Someone passed two snow plows in a ditch! Snow plows--that's nuts. Fortunately, when not traveling, I work from home, so I should be able to just do what I normally do. Today I need to pack anyway, I'm supposed to head to Madison tomorrow and then off to Kearney on Thursday. Hopefully, it will be plowed tomorrow.

So, what's the lesson for me in all of this? Never trust the birds.

Will We Get Snow?

So, I put the feeder back up this afternoon and what does it say about the weather?
The empty bird feeder in the afternoon says no snow. Non Birding Bill and I took a walk in the neighborhood and heard birds singing territory songs: cardinals, juncoes, hairy woodpeckers and crows. Robins were all over and geese were flying overhead. These did not sound like birds getting ready for a feeding frenzy before a storm.

So, I predict that there will be little to no snow out my window tomorrow morning and it will look very similar to what it looked like this morning:

Snow and eBird

All the papers and news stations are predicting a heavy snow warning for the Twin Cities area. Non Birding Bill and I even cancelled a trip today because of it. However, watching the feeders, I think the warning might be a tad overblown. Usually when our tv stations predict inches and inches we don't get very much and when they don't tell us about any snow, we get slammed. So, I try to use the feeder as an indicator. I'm not getting an increase of activity at the feeder, so I think we might get just a dusting. I've got the usual suspects, but it certainly isn't the feeding frenzy that usually happens before a big snow. The bird above is a male house finch and that is a starling taking a few peanuts in the photo below (because how often do you see a starling in a blog?). Both of these photos were taken by the NovaBird Camera in the morning, I'm going to set it up later in the afternoon to see if there's a difference. If there's no big increase at that point, we're not getting much snow.

Migrants are popping up like crazy in the southern half of the state. Birders have been enjoying the high numbers of greater white-fronted geese on Lake Byllesby in Dakota County and more and more reports of red-winged blackbirds and killdeer being seen.

I'm using this weekend to get all of our tax stuff together--ugh, bleh and barf, I say. I have found a wonderful distraction in the meantime: eBird. I've been hearing about eBird for the last couple of years and have even logged on but just couldn't get excited. I wondered how you could guarantee sighting accuracy and how many people actually use it to make it worthwhile? I'm also not a big lister, so keeping track of what I see here and there apart from the check marks in my field guide, just didn't appeal.

Maybe it's the amount of traveling I'm doing and I'm ready to list or I'm just plain avoiding dealing with my taxes, I'm sucked in. It really does make it easy to enter in your birds and there are cool tracking features that will tell you how many birds you have seen this year, how many birds total, where birds are being seen (that will need more input from birders before that is really useful).

If you have not signed into eBird, give it a shot. Even if it is keeping track of your birds in your yard, it's still pretty nifty and over the years could be part of a good network of research. I kind of use the blog archives for that, it's a nice online record that doesn't clutter up your home or your computer's desktop.

Cinnamon Approval?

"Me love parsley!"

I don't know what's gotten into her, she's happy and mischievous, not disapproving and brooding. Surely it can't be that she's that excited to go Nebraska?

Oil Platform Questions

Here is an interesting article about about oil platforms being a haven for overfished marine life. By law, when the oil supply is gone, the gigantic pumps have to be removed. Could that be in a few years or a few decades? The cost, I'm sure will be astromonical. Now, a marine biologist is saying that these platforms help overfished species and should stay. Is this true or just a front so the companies that own the oil platforms won't have to spend the money to take them down? Does the platform's ability to help marine life out weight whatever damage it may do otherwise if it stays?

I now question this on another level. What about how the platforms impact migratory birds? There was an entry awhile ago in Crows Really Are Wise about researchers studying migration patterns and the birds that pop up on platforms that are too exhausted to go on. Birds die from so many things during migration, one of them being that some are too weak to keep going. Since humans are adding new ways for birds to die like cell phone towers and loss of habitat, what if we try to make up for it by turning the platforms into feeding and resting stations during migration? Yes, some would argue that's helping a weak bird who shouldn't survive keep going and passing on the weak genes, but what good does it do if a stronger bird makes it across the gulf, only to be taken out by a cell phone tower or skyscraper window--no genes whatsoever get passed on?

There's also a tourism aspect of it. How many of us have read the articles about researchers being on the oil platform on a magic night when thousands upon thousands of birds pass by. How many of us have thought about what it would be like to stroll on the deck of an oil platform to find cuckoos, warblers, tanagers and orioles just hanging out?

I wonder how long it will be before the owners of the oil platforms start to use birds, as well as fish as an excuse to keep them up when the oil runs dry?